Эйген Розеншток-Хюсси: Жизнь и Мысли Немецко-Американского Философа

German American social philosopher

Eugen Rosenstock Huessy (; July 6, 1888February 24, 1973) was a historian and social philosopher, whose work spanned the disciplines of history, theology, sociology, linguistics and beyond. Born in Berlin, Germany into a non observant Jewish family, the son of a prosperous banker, he converted to Christianity in his late teens, and thereafter the interpretation and reinterpretation of Christianity was a consistent theme in his writings. He met and married Margrit Hüssy in 1914. In 1925, the couple legally combined their names. They had a son, Hans, in 1921. Rosenstock Huessy served as an officer in the German army during World War I. His experience caused him to reexamine the foundations of liberal Western culture. He then pursued an academic career in Germany as a specialist in medieval law, which was disrupted by the rise of Nazism. In 1933, after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, he emigrated to the United States where he began a new academic career, initially at Harvard University and then at Dartmouth College, where he taught from 1935 to 1957. Although never part of the mainstream of intellectual discussion during his lifetime, his work drew the attention of W. H. Auden, Harold Berman, Martin Marty, Lewis Mumford, Page Smith, and others. Rosenstock Huessy may be best known as the close friend of and correspondent with Franz Rosenzweig. Their exchange of letters is considered by scholars of religion and theology to be indispensable in the study of the modern encounter of Jews with Christianity. In his work, Rosenstock Huessy discussed speech and language as the dominant shaper of human character and abilities in every social context. He is viewed as belonging to a group of thinkers who revived post Nietzschean religious thought.

Rosenstock Huessy was born Eugen Friedrich Moritz Rosenstock in Berlin, Germany on July 6, 1888, to Theodor and Paula Rosenstock. His father, a scholarly man, was a banker and a member of the Berlin Stock Exchange. He was the only son among seven surviving children. Despite his parents' Jewish heritage, his family "celebrated some Christian holidays, in keeping with other German families at the time." He joined the Lutheran Protestant Church at age 17 and was christened at age 18. He remained a proponent of Christianity's foundational significance throughout the rest of his life. After graduating from a secondary school (gymnasium) with very high academic standards and an emphasis on classical languages and literature, Rosenstock Huessy pursued law studies at the universities of Zurich, Heidelberg, and Berlin. He corresponded with Franz Rosenzweig and Hans Ehrenberg, regarding the relationship of man with God, as understood through Judaism and Christianity. In 1909 the University of Heidelberg granted him a doctorate in law. In 1912 he became a Privatdozent, a preliminary qualification to becoming a professor, at the University of Leipzig, where he taught constitutional law and the history of law until 1914. In 1914 Rosenstock Huessy visited Florence, Italy to conduct historical research. There he met Margrit Hüssy, a Swiss art history major. They married later that year. World War I broke out shortly thereafter.

At the onset of World War I, the German Army drafted Rosenstock Huessy and stationed him at the Western Front, including 18 months at Verdun, until the war's end. "During this period he organized courses for the troops, replacing the limited instruction in patriotism with broader topics. In 1916, he and his friend, the Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig, also on active duty, exchanged letters on Judaism and Christianity."

After World War I, Rosenstock Huessy became active in labor issues, focusing on improving education as a means to improve the societal standard of living. He returned to academia and started publishing his first noted works.

Rosenstock Huessy did not return to his teaching post at the University of Leipzig. Instead, he obtained a position with Daimler Motoren Gesellschaft, the German car manufacturer, in Stuttgart, Germany. In 1919, he founded and became the editor until 1921 of the first factory newspaper in Germany, the Daimler Werkzeitung (Work Newspaper). In 1921, Rosenstock founded Die Akademie der Arbeit (the Academy of Labor) in Frankfurt am Main. "This institution offered courses and seminars for blue collar workers, but he resigned in 1923 over differences with the trade union representatives. Nevertheless, he did not give up his involvement with adult education and his efforts to give industrial workers a voice of their own in society." He co founded the Patmos Verlag publishing house, which published works on "new religious, philosophical, and social perspectives." in 1914, which he had written in Leipzig and was the source of recognition for his second doctorate. In 1920, Rosenstock Huessy published Die Hochzeit des Krieges und der Revolution (The Marriage of War and Revolution), "a collection of current events essays that were replete with visionary thinking and practical warnings of conflicts to come." wherein he developed a new method for the social sciences based on language, the spoken word, and his "grammatical approach." He later called this approach "metanomics." in 1927 28. That work contained two volumes of essays on the life of the Church and a third volume devoted to documents leading up to Wittig's excommunication." This book showed how 1,000 years of European history had been created from five different European national revolutions that collectively came to an end in World War I. "]]Rosenstock Huessy encountered strong opposition at Harvard University to the presentation of his ideas in social history and other topics, all of which were based on his Christian faith. Reportedly, Rosenstock Huessy frequently mentioned God in class. He also often attacked non religious academic thinking, a teaching tradition assumed by the Harvard faculty to be a prerequisite for high scholarship. Profound differences of opinion ensued and led, in 1935, to his accepting an appointment as professor of social philosophy at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. He made his home in nearby Norwich, Vermont. He taught at Dartmouth until his retirement in 1957. in 1938. George Allen Morgan, a former Harvard student under Alfred North Whitehead and himself the author of the classic What Nietzsche Means, subsequently assisted Rosenstock Huessy in the preparation of The Christian Future or the Modern Mind Outrun ]]

Rosenstock Huessy published Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man and Volume II: On the Forces of History (When the Times Are Obeyed). During 1963 through 1964, he further developed this principle in Volumes I & II of, Die Sprache des Menschengeschlechts: Eine Leibhaftige Grammatik in Vier Teilen (The Speech of Mankind: A Personal Grammar in Four Parts). A collection of his writings, I Am an Impure Thinker offers a good overview of Rosenstock Huessy's thought processes.

Rosenstock Huessy's wife, Margrit, died in 1959. In 1960, Freya von Moltke became Rosenstock Huessy's companion. She was the widow of Helmuth James von Moltke, who had opposed National Socialism and was executed by the Nazis. Rosenstock Huessy died on February 24, 1973.

"The French Revolution first introduced into Europe the notion of the tissue paper frontier. Hitherto, all boundaries had been marshes, forests, mountains, dikes; that is to say, significant boundaries. But when boundaries can be drawn on paper, they need have no more significance than the stroke of a pen or a piece of chalk." "Grammar and logic free language from being at the mercy of the tone of voice. Grammar protects us against misunderstanding the sound of an uttered name; logic protects us against what we say having a double meaning." "He who believes in nothing still needs a girl to believe in him."

Hans Ehrenberg, Franz Rosenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock (Sons for Peace), "Ways of Peace, Lights of Peace", Vol 1 & 2, (Rome: Vatican Press, 1910, New York: Bible Society, 1910). . . . . .

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